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It is the gallows humour of professional sports, those “dead man walking” moments when teammates are hanging out in the privacy of the locker room trying to drown out the noise of the rumour mill churning.

Lowry is seen as the most marketable of the trade-anxious Raptors at the moment, a handful of NBA teams have called to inquire about him, and a Thursday frenzy hammered that point home.

He isn’t sitting around fretting and worrying about what the future holds. His teammates aren’t going to let him get the least bit bent out of shape.

“You see it every day, you see it whenever they update it and everyone talks about it,” Lowry said Friday morning. “We joke about it a little bit, we make it more of a lighter type thing, don’t make it a heavy hearted thing, make it a joke.

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“ ‘Hey, man, you still here?’ Make it a little bit lighter on the players in that situation.”

Joking aside — and it would seem the best way to handle it — there is no doubt that Lowry is, and will continue to be, a coveted Toronto asset.

The New York Knicks and Brooklyn Nets have already called, according to league and team sources, the Los Angeles Lakers are in dire need of a point guard with Steve Blake out for months and uncertainty surrounding the future of Steve Nash.

Lowry, in the final year of a contract that will pay him about $6.2 million this year, is a known commodity playing for a team looking more towards the future than the present so it’s logical Toronto would explore options.

And in this media day and age, where it’s virtually impossible to keep secrets and anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can pass off fantasy as fact, Lowry is bound to hear more than a fair share of speculation.

“Yes, of course,” he said when asked if the incessant speculation weighed on him. “Nobody can say it doesn’t but at the same time, you have to know that this is a business, you have to know the situation that you’re in, the situation that you’re going to be in.

“You can’t let it affect you too much because you still have to go out there and do a job and try to win for the team that you’re playing for.”

Lowry’s play hasn’t fallen off a bit since his name has been tossed around so much. He took averages of 16.1 points, 7.8 assists and only 2.8 turnovers a game into Friday night’s contest with the Philadelphia 76ers and has led or tied for the team lead in assists in 12 straight games. He has comported himself well in the face of the rumours and knows he must continue to do so.

The harsh truth is that trade or no trade, the eight-year veteran isn’t guaranteed employment anywhere next season.

“I still have to show I can play this game,” he said. “I’ve been doing a great job, we haven’t won as many games as we would have liked here but I’m still going to play hard and we’re going to try to win every single game, every single night.”

And when the rumours heat up again like they did Thursday, when the Knicks lost starting point guard Raymond Felton for up to three weeks and the Lakers announced Blake might miss two months with an elbow injury, Lowry is likely to handle things the same way he did.

“I started hearing after I left here from practice and it was crazy for about four hours and I turned my phone off and went to sleep,” he said. “I’ll wake up and if I’m traded, I’m traded; if not I’ll come to shootaround.”

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